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Friday, June 24, 2011
Law - Legal ethics and Watergate, taught by John Dean
Ameet Sachdev of the Chicago Law column in the Chicago Tribune has a fascinating story today - a quote:
Dean's misconduct during the cover-up and the ethical lapses of many lawyers involved in the nation's greatest political scandal sparked reforms in professional conduct that reached down into law schools. Nearly 40 years after the Watergate break-in, the crimes still present sobering lessons.Dean's ethics seminars, which he kicked off last week in Chicago, are part history and part morality play. He plays tapes of conversations from the Oval Office that Richard Nixon had secretly recorded, shows snippets from his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973 and displays some of his handwritten notes.
The dramatic story drives home Dean's message that lawyers today have more leverage to report wrongdoing because of changes in the law and in lawyer conduct rules since Watergate. He said he believes the rule changes are so powerful that history would have been different had they existed in 1972.
Few individuals can provide such a compelling example of how people slip into crime and fraud.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 24, 2011 12:25 PM
Posted to General Law Related